Do you have range anxiety?

You’ve likely suffered from range anxiety if you own an electric car and wonder if you have enough battery power to reach your destination!

The greatest fear of an electric car driver is traveling too far from home and running out of juice. Batteries in these cars have progressively got better and better but you still can’t go on a long road trip in your Tesla Model S. Until now! When you think you’re about to run out of battery power, your tires will end up powering your car.

Smart technology of the future will use energy that is wasted in the process and convert it into working energy. This is the concept behind what Goodyear unveiled at the Geneva Auto show. The energy released in your tires heating up on the road can now be used to charge the battery in your Prius. The more energy efficient our cars are, the better for everyone in our world. This could be a starting point for many different technologies that could use wasted energy.

It may be some time before that technology hits the cold streets of Regina but what a brilliant way to reuse some energy that is currently being wasted on every tire of every vehicle on the road!

At SXSW this year, the app enthusiasts finally had something to rave about. Introducing the first breakthrough app to be revealed to a large audience at South by Southwest since Foursquare – everyone, meet Meerkat.

Meerkat is an app the allows the user to use the camera in a smart phone as a live web cam. When you activate Meerkat, it lets your followers on Twitter know you’re live streaming video. When you end the streaming or close the app, the videos is gone. It’s not saved or stored or kept on file, just streams your video, like a window into your world.

This, for obvious reason, got a lot of people in the tech industry excited. Launching at the infamous SXSW conference was a smart way to get the initial 100,000 downloads. Everyone was downloading Meerkat. Well that was until Twitter found out. Twitter didn’t like this much. After all, Meerkat was using networks people had already established on Twitter to broadcast to. Smart strategy really, until Twitter doesn’t want you using their network anymore.

What we found out after SXSW is that a couple months prior, Twitter acquired a company that does something peculiarly similar. Periscope, an app that offers similar features to Meerkat but is owned by Twitter.

And the Twitterrati were shut down.

It didn’t take long for Twitter to notify the owners of Meerkat that they will no longer have access to the Twitter Social Graph (where Twitter tracks who follows who), basically making Twitter useless to Meerkat. But a defensive move against an opponent signals a sign of assumed weakness. Is Twitter worried that Meerkat already has the marketshare of mobile streaming?

Enter Periscope. Twitter’s live streaming app and Meerkat competitor. They look remarkably similar but the edge has to go to Periscope as it has more features and is backed by Twitter’s already massive network. Periscope seems like the App with more options for what you want to do with live streaming but there is certainly something to be said about going to market first. Meerkat has much more momentum coming off a great launch at SXSW.

It may not be whether or not Meerkat is going to beat out Periscope or vice versa, the question we are asking, are live streaming apps here to stay? What other applications do live streaming apps have other than festivals, shows, vacations, or entertainment?

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1. Apple sold 411,000 iPhones per day in 2013. That’s right, 150 million iPhones were sold in the year making an astounding 411,000 on average sold per day. If you really want to get technical, Apple sold 17,123 iPhones per hour in 2013 or 258 iPhones sold on average per minute. That is a lot of iPhones.

2. Apple now has a mind-boggling $178,000,000,000 in cash. With that they could buy Twitter, Box, Pandora, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL, Groupon, Zynga, Shutterfly, Yelp & GoPro, with $48B in cash left over. Really puts it into perspective when you compare to other companies in the technology sector. OR if you don’t want to compare to some of the tech giants, with that kind of money they could buy Ford, GM, and Tesla and still have $41.3 billion left over. Either way, Apple as a lot of cash.

3. If Apple distributed its cash to the 320 million Americans, each person would receive $556. Want to kickstart the economy? Try giving away all of your cash on hand! You may be out of business but you’re going to make millions of Americans prosper…..or have one crazy $556 dollar night out or purchase $556 hotdogs at Costco.

I’d vote for the Costco option, everyone likes Costco hotdogs.

4. One day late in January 2015 overnight Apple’s market capitalization grew by 58 billon dollars. To put $58,000,000,000 in context, Ford is worth $56,660,000,000. Upon hearing the company beat quarterly earnings, Apple in one night gained $58 billion in market capitalization. Market Capitalization is based on a companies share price multiplied by the amount of shares outstanding. If your investors think your company should be valued at more than it is, generally your stock price will improve. You could say that investors are quite happy with how Apple has been doing.

5. Apple earns US$300,000 per minute. Selling 258 phones per minute it makes sense that Apple makes $300,000 per minutes. Sometimes you sit back in awe of what this tech giant has done.

6. Everything you say to Siri is sent to Apple, analyzed and stored. To quote Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility”, just because you can ask Siri anything you want, doesn’t mean you should ask Siri anything you want. Some things are better left not talked about.

Privacy in this post-internet world will constantly be under attack as more and more companies and brands want better data on their customers. Companies that don’t thoroughly understand what customer information is being used for can come under scrutiny in the future as data leaks, and hacks become more and more main stream. Don’t let this happen to you, understand what information you’re keeping as well as ‘why’ you’re keeping it. And no “because we want to sell it in the future” is not a viable option.

7. Every Apple iPhone ad displays the time as 9:41 AM, the time Steve Jobs unveiled it in 2007. You’re probably opening a new tab and looking up every iPhone ad since 2007. Everything to Steve Jobs had meaning, even the minute details, that’s what made his designs so different. So it’s to no surprise that the time displayed on the phone has to have a meaning.

8. In Japan’s Apple Store, there was a fan who started waiting in line 7 months early for iPhone 6. Can you believe that? I mean Snapchat is pretty revolutionary but waiting in line for 7 months for a device that slightly marginally better than the iPhone 5?!

9. 60% of apps in the Apple App Store have never been downloaded. Does it surprise you? How many people have you heard say, “do I have just the best idea for an app that’s going to be worth billions” then they go on to ramble off about some made up problem they think people have and how their revolutionary app is going to solve it. 60% makes sense. The fact that it’s not that difficult to build an app anymore and as it gets easier more and more useless apps are created.

But you know what they say, if you want to create a remarkable app, one that really gets talked about, create lots and lots of apps. Eventually you’ll get you one.

10. Apple’s net income last quarter was $18 billion, the largest quarterly earnings for any company ever. Now they’re just trying to break records. I mean c’mon, best quarter earnings ever?! Think about all the amazing organizations that have had large profits, majority marketshare, ever increasing growth curves and none of them compare to how Apple did in the 4th quarter of their 2014.

11. Apple CEO Tim Cook is the first and currently only openly gay person in the Fortune 500. After what happened at the Olympics in 2014 there has been a worldwide increase in support for all different lifestyles. It’s pretty cool Tim Cook is one of those leaders who will help our world be more accepting of peoples differences.

Hello Moto Xiaomi. Welcome the world’s third largest smartphone maker. A once small startup, now Xiaomi employs 5,000 people in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia. They began operations in 2010, sold their first phone in 2011, and in 2014, three short years later, they sold over 60 million phones.

Our entire world has gone mobile. I teach a class at Sask Poly Technic in Regina and every year for the past three years I’ve polled the class as to how many people have smart phones. Every year usually only one person doesn’t have a smart phone (but ironically enough they are always quit to whip out their flip phone circa 2003). No wonder this young startup in China has grown exponentially over the past half decade. They’re making something that (almost) everyone in the developed and undeveloped world use every day; a smart phone.

The plot twist of this story is that Xiaomi has no plans of coming into North America any time soon. At one time a hot bed for the latest and greatest technology is now on a list of countries tech giants may or my not enter. The times are sure changing. A sign that North America may, in fact, not be the centre of the Universe, these growing third world countries are maturing into global business powerhouses. If North America doesn’t pick up it’s digital socks and start developing the worlds bleeding edge technology, it won’t be only the third most popular phone that’ll be coming out of China but everything else we use in our daily lives.

What is Bitcoin?

Traditional currency (the Canadian Dollar, the U.S. Dollar, the Swiss Franc) is a bill or coin, backed by the gold standard, and currently regulated by Governments worldwide. Bitcoin is unregulated, backed by no one and is a “virtual currency” – there is no physical ‘Bitcoins’. The transfer of Bitcoins is from Peer to Peer so there is no need for a central clearing bank. This has led to the U.S. Treasury considering Bitcoins a “decentralized virtual currency”.

Eventhough with the warnings, many online places will allow payment with Bitcoin (AND in Regina you can even convert your hard earned Bitcoin into Canadian currency at Triffons Pizza in the South end. Check out CoinMap, it gives you a Google Map view of all the places that accept Bitcoin.

At the writing of this post, a single Bitcoin is worth 426 Canadian dollars.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency, meaning it’s only online. It’s paving the way for a new way of thinking about how we will pay for items in our life. Some people love it, some hate it, obviously anyone in the traditional banking world be weary of it and, like anything new, we’re always scared of it.

If you don’t want to purchase Bitcoin with real dollars, you can buy a mining rig. It might cost you a lot and as more and more people are trying to mine Bitcoin, it gets more and more difficult TO mine.

So do you think it will become mainstream? Do you think Bitcoin will replace the Canadian dollar?

While Apple (AAPL) prepares to attack the affordable tablet market with a smaller, cheaper iPad, Research In Motion (RIMM) is taking the opposite approach. RIM has been toying with a 10-inch tablet for quite some time, and the project was reportedly sidelined last year as focused shifted to the struggling vendor’s next-generation BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Recent rumors suggest the larger PlayBook has been resurrected, however, and will debut some time next year. A user on Vietnamese forum Tinhte published purported images of the device and we have no reason to doubt their authenticity. Few details are found in the photographs beyond the fact that it looks like a larger version of RIM’s 7-inch slate, and we can also see a 7,250 mAh battery in one image. There is also “BlackBerry 4G PlayBook” branding on the bottom of the tablet, so it’s safe to assume it will at least ship with an HSPA+ radio.

iMore has learned that Apple is planning to debut the new iPhone at a special event on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, with the release date to follow 9 days later on Friday, September 21. This information comes from sources who have proven accurate in the past.

The iPad mini will be announced at the same September 12 event, as will the new iPod nano. We haven’t heard a release date for the iPad mini yet, but it could be the same as the iPhone 5. It seems likely the new iPod touch will make an appearance on September 12 as well, though we haven’t heard any specific information about that yet either.

Last year, the iPhone 4S was announced on Tuesday, October 4, 2011, and released 10 days later on October 14. The event included minor updates to the iPod line, notably a white iPod touch 4. This year, the iPad 3 was announced on Wednesday, March 7, 2012, and released 9 days later on March 16. The event included a 1080p Apple TV.

Back in March, we heard Apple was targeting an October release window for the iPhone 5,1, much like last year’s iPhone 4,1 (iPhone 4S). Recently, however, several reports have suggested Apple would be ready to go as early as September. Last week, App4Phone.fr, citing Chinese manufacturing sources, reported the September 21 release date.

Unlike last year, when some 16 months separated the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4, a September 21 schedule would put the iPhone 5 launch at just over 11 months after the iPhone 4S.

The longer schedule last year allowed Apple to re-position the iPhone as the new, big fall product release. It took the spotlight from the iPod family that previously ruled the holiday quarter, but has waned in recent years. It also padded the time between the Verizon iPhone 4 launch, which only occurred in February of 2011, and gave four extra months for Apple to work on iOS 5, which included major new features like iCloud, Notification Center, iMessage, and Siri.

iOS 6, which was announced during Apple’s WWDC 2012 keynote on June 11 and includes a new, Google-free Maps app, and Passbook, should get a final presentation during the September 12 event as well, and if Apple sticks to previous patterns, a release sometime around Wednesday, September 19.

Apple typically shows off extra, hardware-specific iOS features at new iPhone events as well. For the last few years, Apple SVP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, has demonstrated advanced camera and video recording, and Apple SVP of iOS, Scott Forstall, has demonstrated Voice Control, FaceTime, and Siri. For now, we have only educated guesses (see the conclusion) as to what else might be coming to iOS this year.

Apple’s upcoming entry into the high-definition television space is set to blow the high end of the TV market wide open while current market players continue their struggles to compete on price. Market research firm KAE along with online polling company Toluna recently conducted a survey and determined that 25% of consumers in the United States would purchase a physical Apple television set if the Cupertino-based company launches one. Beyond early consumer interest, however, current TV industry players may have left a gaping hole that will bring Apple billions when it fills the void. Read more

I’ve long been predicting that RIM was going to get bought out, or *something* was going to happen. Well some pretty solid rumors are starting to fly.

To set the stage a few things have happened. Google bought motorola. The other major brand using android software for phones is for the most part Samsung. Obviously a huge company, they have a concern that google could close their os and become a competitor to samsung. Hmmmmm. What to do? I wonder who has an awesome OS that we could partner with and keep making money. Read more